Eight years ago, Taleb Mohamad Almahmoud started importing a non-alcoholic drink popular in the Middle East to Malaysia. Now he’s bringing more than 300,000 bottles of Dubai-brewed Barbican into the country a month.

“There are many Arabs here and they like the drink because there’s no alcohol,” the Syrian-born Almahmoud said in a November 17 interview near his shop in downtown Kuala Lumpur that also stocks spices, couscous, pickled olives and Turkish coffee. “Malaysians like it too.”

“If the merger goes through, it may be the starting point for banks to seriously look beyond Malaysia because it makes no sense for them to compete with smaller banks [here],” Datuk Dr Mohd Daud Bakar, group chairman of Amanie Advisors told The Edge Financial Daily in an interview.

“It will be very much a catalyst for global Islamic finance and banking from Malaysia. We are hopeful that it will be the reality in the near future,” said Mohd Daud, who is also president of the International Institute of Islamic Finance.